I really liked The City Inside and felt this author did well at capturing my favourite cyberpunk vibes. I don't think this follow up reached those heights. 

It's incredibly messy. The book seems start halfway through the plot. As a result, I couldn't connect with the characters properly. They're not fleshed out enough and continue as thin representations of ideas. For example, Bador is a bot designed like a monkey. He's motivated by Bot Rights I guess, but it's only mentioned in passing a couple of times, so it's hard to care about Bador himself. For a main character, he felt sidelined. The dialogue for all characters was downright bad at times, and that's honestly something I don't usually pick up on.

Lina, his human sibling, is supposed to be a revolutionary hero trained from birth by her rebel parents. Again, she didn't feel like a real person. Most of her 'characterisation' comes at the end of the book where she gives a long speech about her life and how she's perfectly crafted to be the big hero. But we never actually saw much of that before this point. 

The plot was odd for a scifi book. I know it's a retelling of Aladdin, but it felt too fantastical. What I like about the cyberpunk genre is that you can see how our world could turn into this. But the way plot jumped around and issues got resolved conveniently meant that all the elements didn't mesh together well. I'm not sure how else to describe it, but the vibe was just very...silly, to be honest. And the messy worldbuilding meant I struggled to visualise what was happening. 

Honestly, the only reason I kept going is because I didn't want to dnf 2 books in a row.